


i know that i've got issues, but you're pretty messed up too (either way i found out i'm nothing without you)

by thisismetrying



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Addiction, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Benny having OCD is my headcanon, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gambling, a benny centric fic, also i'm so sorry i'm incapable of focusing on one fic at a time lol, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29055813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisismetrying/pseuds/thisismetrying
Summary: He doesn’t like Beth Harmon. He doesn’t like her and her red hair and her pretty dresses. He doesn’t like how she moves with such surety, how she attacks like Alekhine and has the intuition of Morphy. He doesn’t like her bull-headed stubbornness paired with her doe eyes that make him want to strangle her and kiss her all at once. He doesn’t like the way Beth Harmon gets under his skin.He doesn’t like the way she’s in his head and he can’t unmemorize her, any more than he can unmemorize the mental chess board that lives in his mind.-Or Benny between calls in episode 7, "End Game"
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Comments: 11
Kudos: 100





	i know that i've got issues, but you're pretty messed up too (either way i found out i'm nothing without you)

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so this came to me since Beth/Benny live in my mind rent free and I also am incapable of focusing on just one fic at a time. Hope you like it!
> 
> Lyrics belong to Kelly Clarkson's absolute banger "My Life Would Suck Without You"

_Maybe I was stupid_

_For telling you goodbye,_

_Maybe I was wrong_

_For trying to pick a fight_

_I know that I’ve got issues but you’re pretty messed up too_

_Either way, I found out, I’m nothing without you_

-

“Don’t call me anymore.” He slams the phone down into the receiver, angrily. 

_Goddamn it. Where the fuck does she get off?_ Benny wonders. He still can’t believe she made such a _stupid_ decision. A stupid decision for what? For her principles? For her pride? And then she’d called and asked him if he’d had the money. After she’d gotten drunk and hadn’t come back to New York. And then to imply that he’d gambled it all away. _The fucking nerve._

He stews and stews, getting angrier and angrier.

He doesn’t like Beth Harmon. He doesn’t like her and her red hair and her pretty dresses. He doesn’t like how she moves with such surety, how she attacks like Alekhine and has the intuition of Morphy. He doesn’t like her bull-headed stubbornness paired with her doe eyes that make him want to strangle her and kiss her all at once. He doesn’t like the way Beth Harmon gets under his skin.

He doesn’t like the way she’s in his head and he can’t unmemorize her, any more than he can unmemorize the mental chess board that lives in his mind.

He looks around at the apartment. It’s not much, he knows that, but it’s got a bed, a toilet, and a shower (albeit in the kitchen), and that’s all he really needs. Honestly, he hardly uses the kitchen at all. It’s a place where he can practice chess and that’s the most important thing.

He stares at the chess set before him, one of several in the apartment. The way he’d slammed down the receiver messed up the chess set in front of him. He goes to fix the slightly askew pieces.

That’s one thing about Benny Watts. He hates, hates mess and disorder. Whenever he sits down to a chess match, he has to make sure the pieces are all exactly right, exactly in the middle of their little square. And if they’re not, he has to fix them before he can concentrate on his moves, on the clock.

He wears mostly black because it’s neat, it’s clean (and yes, okay, he thinks he looks rather dashing in it, pulling off the hip cowboy-pirate-alternative look he so carefully cultivates). Other colors, mixing and matching, are too messy, too unkempt.

And he hates, hates mess in his personal life. He keeps his personal life relatively simple. He has chess, and he has chess friends, and any outside _liaisons,_ he makes it clear to them that it’s a strictly physical thing.

Then Beth Harmon came into his life and messed everything up.

-

He’s in the back room of some lounge, the air thick with smoke and the smell of cheap plastic.

“I’ll raise,” he says, adding another bundle of chips to the pile.

The men around him nod and add their own bets to the pile. There’s a nice pot in the middle of the table now, and if he can just get this round to go his way, it’ll all be his.

Not that he really needs the money, right this minute, but it’d be nice. This is his fifth night in a row at one of New York’s underground casinos. Or, as he likes to think of them, dens of iniquity. He thinks it gives it an edge and is much more fun to say. A den of iniquity sounds like a place a pirate or a cowboy would frequent. And of course, there is plenty of iniquity to be found, from cards to billiards to girls to pills.

(He doesn’t like to think about the last two too much).

Benny makes sure to rotate between casinos, never frequenting one twice in a row, lest he piss off the owners. When Benny comes around, he makes sure to clean up, and more than a few times he’s been suspected of cheating.

Of course, he’s never been found out, because he doesn’t cheat. Unless you count using that astronomically big brain of his and his penchant for logic cheating.

Still, you don’t want to piss off anyone who runs a casino.

He’d had a little scuffle in an alley a few years ago when he’d first moved to New York, before he got smart about which dens he frequented and how often. Since then, he’s taken to carrying a knife around in a holster on his belt. He didn’t lie when he said it was for protection (of course, it also adds to his enigmatic look, which is always a plus).

He’s made the rounds these past few weeks, so he’ll have to lay low for a while after tonight. He wants to take home a sum.

Besides, while he’s not hurting for money, the few weeks he’d taken off to train Beth, he’d mainly floated off the stacks he carefully places under his bed (his version of savings). They’re dangerously low and he’d like to start replenishing them.

 _Beth_. _Five weeks in his apartment._ (How dare she accuse him of gambling all his money away when part of the reason he didn’t have it was because he’d spent five weeks training her, when he could have come out and won at least $500 a night for a few nights in that time).

He takes a drag off his cigarette and pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s been trying so hard to not think about her, not think about her impending match against Borgov, to think about _anything_ else.

That’s part of what led him here, to this gambling spree.

He’d tried to concentrate and focus on chess, get back into honing his own skills, playing the latest European grandmaster games. But every time he picked up a pamphlet or sat down to the chess board, all he could think of was red hair, a lithe body, a wicked wit, and a killer chess instinct.

So poker it had been. Poker, the one part of his life Beth Harmon hadn’t infected, hadn’t wormed her way into.

Plus, the money was better any way and there was no way his rating could be hurt.

He also had to admit, he liked the high it gave him. It was different from chess. Chess was focused, strategic, logical, clear-cut. Poker was similar, but different. In both games, you had to read your opponent, be prepared for a myriad of options.

But there’s a reason chess is played in boring auditoriums on cheap plastic pieces and why poker is played in dens of iniquity, he thinks, looking around. Half his opponents are drunk, or just about near it, the other quarter are high out of their minds and decided to try out poker for a lark, and the other quarter are too busy ogling the girls that are walking around in skimpy clothes with trays of cocktails.

He’s amusedly laughing to himself at the thought, almost distracted, when he sees a flash of red on a skinny body with pale skin and for a moment, he can’t breathe, he can’t—

_What is she doing here?_

His head pounds, his heart is inexplicably in his throat and he can’t tell if it’s hope or worry or plain bewilderment and—

The body turns, revealing the woman’s face and he sinks, he can tell, even from across the room that it’s not her.

“Watts, you there?”

He looks back to the game, his opponents, who seem to be paying more attention than he previously gave them credit for.

“Yeah,” he says. He looks down at his hand.

 _Fuck._

-

Harry Beltik calls him and to say he’s surprised is an understatement. He’s still slightly hungover from last night, when he’d gotten drunk after he’d lost $600 on that blasted poker game, and Harry’s voice rings in his ears.

“How’d you get this number?” he asks into the phone. He’s never been particularly fond of Beltik, thinks he was overrated even before he got beat by a 15-year-old Beth. And he especially didn’t like him when he’d heard that he’d taken it upon himself to train Beth. As if he had anything to teach Beth.

“From the Federation. They have a list,” Harry says.

“Oh,” Benny replies. Why is this asshole calling him?

“Have you talked to Beth lately?”

 _You mean since I told her not to call anymore? Nope._ Instead, he says, “No.”

Harry’s words come out in a tumble. “I saw her at a local tournament. She reeked of booze.”

“Yeah?” he says, trying to make his voice disinterested. This isn’t news to him anyway.

“And then she didn’t even compete in the tournament, according to the director.”

 _That’s_ news to him. The Beth he knows doesn’t back down from a challenge. But hell, he doesn’t either (or never used to), but lately he’s questioning that too these days, so what the hell, maybe Beth is too.

When Benny doesn’t answer, Harry continues. “I’m worried about her.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” he says. He knows he’s being cruel, but he can’t really bring himself to care.

“I thought…I thought,” Harry stammers. “I thought that you might want to help…”

“Help what?” he laughs into the receiver. “Help Beth? Like anyone could help her. Like she’d let anyone. She doesn’t want help, anyway Harry.” He’s annoyed now. This is why Beltik called him?

“I think she’s crying out for help. Either way, she needs help,” Harry’s soft voice reverberates through the line.

 _I tried. At least, I think I did._ “Not from me,” he says.

“She needs to know that people care. I thought you cared,” Harry’s voice has now gone to pleading. Benny hates it. Where did this scrawny washed-up chess bum get these ideas?

“Well, you thought wrong.”

He goes to hang up, but not before he hears Beltik’s last words, almost a whisper through the phone.

“It’s okay if you do.”

_No, it’s not._

Nothing is okay.

-

Benny pushes his pawn, capturing Levertov’s knight. He leans back in his chair, his floral robe revealing the flat planes of his stomach.

Levertov is eagerly studying the board, committing their positions to memory. Benny’s sure he’ll go home and try to make a problem out of it.

He wishes he’d just go home now.

He doesn’t know why he invited him over.

“Benny? What’s wrong?” Levertov asks in that slightly British accent.

God, is he really that out of it that even Levertov can tell something is wrong? Him and Levertov are chess buddies, sure, and he’d call them friends, but they never _talk._ Benny couldn’t tell you two things about Levertov that don’t have to do with chess.

“Nothing,” he grumbles and makes his move.

“Is it about Beth?”

Benny freezes.

“What? No. Why?” He shakes his head. Why is _Levertov_ asking about _Beth?_ Can’t one single thing in his world not be about Beth?

Levertov shrugs his shoulders. “You’ve been down since she left,” he says, casually. “Cleo mentioned what happened in Paris. And after.”

 _Of course Cleo would talk,_ Benny thinks. But how the hell did she know what happened after? He doesn’t even know what happened after. She didn’t come back. She went and got drunk. She didn’t respond to his _I miss you._ She rejected the Christian charity money. She asked him for money. He’d told her not to call. She hadn’t.

“After, in the match against Borgov,” Levertov says.

_Oh,_ Benny thinks, _that after._ It seems like a lifetime ago. A lifetime ago that he was begging Beth to come back to New York, trying to compromise with her, tell her she could come get drunk here. There’d been worse things that happened in this apartment, worse mistakes, (worse things said after sex). But it hadn’t worked.

“You know, you should just tell her how you feel,” Levertov says.

Since when did they start talking like this?

“I don’t feel anything,” Benny replies dully. It might be a lie, but he’s not sure he knows the truth. Hopefully Levertov will drop it.

But he doesn’t. “If you can’t tell her, show her.”

Benny snaps. “Since when did you become a relationship expert?”

Levertov smiles. “Being in a relationship with two people teaches you some things,” he says, as he gets up and goes for his coat.

As he’s letting himself out, he turns and gives Benny one last piece of advice. “Nobody’s perfect, Benny.” He opens the door. “But if someone matters, that’s insignificant. Think of it as an extra move to get your pawn to queen.” 

-

He picks up the phone, the dial tone ringing in his ear.

“Operator.”

“The Lexington Herald in Kentucky, please.”

-

“Hello?”

His heart flutters and all the things he wants to say, wants to tell, are stuck in his mouth. So he takes Levertov’s advice.

“If he goes for the knight, hit him with the king rook pawn.”

-

_Cause we belong together now, yeah_

_Forever united her somehow, yeah_

_You got a piece of me_

_And honestly,_

_My life would suck without you_

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed this. I had fun writing it and trying to get into Benny's head (which has always been harder for me than getting into Beth's head and writing from her perspective). Comments welcome as always!


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